Madame De Treymes eBook

She spoke quite easily and naturally, as if it were
the most commonplace thing in the world for them to
be straying afoot together over Paris; but even his
vague knowledge of the world she lived in—­a
knowledge mainly acquired through the perusal of yellow-backed
fiction—­gave a thrilling significance to
her naturalness. Durham, indeed, was beginning
to find that one of the charms of a sophisticated
society is that it lends point and perspective to
the slightest contact between the sexes. If, in
the old unrestricted New York days, Fanny Frisbee,
from a brown stone door-step, had proposed that they
should take a walk in the Park, the idea would have
presented itself to her companion as agreeable but
unimportant; whereas Fanny de Malrive’s suggestion
that they should stroll across the Tuileries was obviously
fraught with unspecified possibilities.

He was so throbbing with the sense of these possibilities
that he walked beside her without speaking down the
length of the wide alley which follows the line of
the Rue de Rivoli, suffering her even, when they reached
its farthest end, to direct him in silence up the
steps to the terrace of the Feuillants. For, after
all, the possibilities were double-faced, and her
bold departure from custom might simply mean that
what she had to say was so dreadful that it needed
all the tenderest mitigation of circumstance.

There was apparently nothing embarrassing to her in
his silence: it was a part of her long European
discipline that she had learned to manage pauses with
ease. In her Frisbee days she might have packed
this one with a random fluency; now she was content
to let it widen slowly before them like the spacious
prospect opening at their feet. The complicated
beauty of this prospect, as they moved toward it between
the symmetrically clipped limes of the lateral terrace,
touched him anew through her nearness, as with the
hint of some vast impersonal power, controlling and
regulating her life in ways he could not guess, putting
between himself and her the whole width of the civilization
into which her marriage had absorbed her. And
there was such fear in the thought—­he read
such derision of what he had to offer in the splendour
of the great avenues tapering upward to the sunset
glories of the Arch—­that all he had meant
to say when he finally spoke compressed itself at
last into an abrupt unmitigated: “Well?”

She answered at once—­as though she had
only awaited the call of the national interrogation—­“I
don’t know when I have been so happy.”

“So happy?” The suddenness of his joy
flushed up through his fair skin.

“As I was just now—­taking tea with
your mother and sisters.”

Durham’s “Oh!” of surprise betrayed
also a note of disillusionment, which she met only
by the reconciling murmur: “Shall we sit
down?”

He found two of the springy yellow chairs indigenous
to the spot, and placed them under the tree near which
they had paused, saying reluctantly, as he did so:
“Of course it was an immense pleasure to them
to see you again.”